There a few ways to measure the effectiveness of a new curriculum. However, one thing to be aware of is the possibility of an implementation dip. Implementation dip is known as a "dip in performance and confidence as one encounters an innovation that requires new skills and new understandings". Judgments made about the effectiveness of a new curriculum in year one should be tempered by an understanding of the quality of the implementation and the likelihood of a dip in performance.

What norms can I use to determine this?

Curricular effectiveness must be judged in some context. That context can be provided by what other schools or grades are doing, or what the schools or grades did in the past. A third context might be some pre-determined goal for growth or even status. School norms are powerful tool for providing this context. See MAP Growth: Where can I find the Norms Study and related documents?

School norms will answer questions like these:

How did our school’s growth or specific grades’ growth compare to typical growth of all schools?

How did our school’s growth or specific grades’ growth compare to last year’s growth?

Did our school or specific grades’ meet our goal?

How did our school or specific grades’ status compare to other schools’ status? (use spring percentile rank)

What else can help provide this information?

The school norms may provide satisfactory answers. If not, a further analysis can look at individual growth across the whole school or for specific grades.

Schools can answer such questions as these:

Did a higher percentage of our students meet typical growth (50th percentile) than in the past?

What percentage of our students met their growth goals?

Did we meet the school goal for individual growth?

Looking at overall individual growth can also aid in analyzing curricular effectiveness for various sub-groups. Some schools may not be typical, either very high performing or low performing. Self-comparisons will still be valid, but for comparisons to other schools, these schools may need custom reports to find a valid comparison group. See Custom report requests.

In summary, schools that want to use MAP data to evaluate curriculum should craft a set of questions like the ones here, and use either school or individual norms data to seek answers. The schools themselves will have to determine the answers to say the curriculum is or isn’t effective.